Slashdot Mirror

Abuse of Email/Spamming

The Service(s) you have purchased from AT&T may include the ability to send and receive electronic mail ("Email").

Prohibited activities include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Mass electronic messages and "mail bombings" (sending mass Email or deliberately sending very large attachments to one recipient);
* Spamming, or sending unsolicited commercial Email (UCE), sending unsolicited Email soliciting charitable donations, or sending chain Email;
* Forging Email headers (transmission information);
* Using another computer, without authorization, to send multiple Email messages or to retransmit Email messages for the purpose of misleading recipients as to the origin;
* Use of electronic mail to harass or intimidate other users;
* Use of redirect links in unsolicited commercial Email (UCE) to advertise a website or service;
* Use of an AT&T-provided Email address, Service or website to spam advertise, or collect responses from unsolicited Email

(Emphasis added.) Not to mention this:

Network Security

It is your responsibility to ensure the security of your network and the machines that connect to the Service(s). You are responsible for ensuring that your customers and users use the Service(s) in an appropriate manner. You are required to take all necessary steps to manage the use of the Service(s) obtained from AT&T in such a way that network abuse is minimized. Violations of system or network security are prohibited, and may result in criminal and/or civil liability.

Examples of system or network security violations include, but are not limited to the following:

* Failing to secure your system against abuse. You are responsible for configuring and securing your services to prevent damage to the AT&T network and/or the disruption of Service(s) to other customers. You will be held liable if unknown third parties utilize your services at any time for the purpose of illegally distributing licensed software. It is your responsibility to ensure that your network and/or computer are configured in a secure manner, and to take corrective actions on vulnerable or exploited systems to prevent continued abuse. You may not, through action or inaction, allow others to use your network for illegal or inappropriate uses, and/or any other disruptive, provoking, or abusive behavior that is in violation of these guidelines or the agreement for the Service(s) you have purchased;
* With respect to Dial-up accounts, using any software or device designed to defeat system time-out limits or to allow your account to stay logged on while you are not actively using the AT&T Service(s) or using your account for the purpose of operating a server of any type;
* Uploading or distributing files that contain viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancel bots, corrupted files, or any other similar software or programs that may damage the operation of another's computer or property of another;

Via Bellsouth. It's rumored to be rolled out to other major BS areas towards the end of the year.

http://www.bims.bellsouth.net/bei_atl/index.htm

For example, Bellsouth DSL provides plenty of description here:

Bellsouth FastAccess DSL - Legal Page

I'm not saying I'm happy with their provisions, but I'm also thinking that attempting to sue them over these particular greivances may be a bit optimistic.

Don't wait, tell them what you think about this: Contact BellSouth Internet Services.

BTW, the film mentioned in the second link, votergate, is worth downloading. A torrent is available if the main site is going slowly, though they seem to have upgraded their bandwidth.

How not to test a magnetron...

Bellsouth (a baby bell operating in the Southeast US) has a large Jabber server implementation. Press release. FAQ. One thing I wish they would do is provision the account and provide that info to new users as signup. You have to search their website or ask support to find out about it now.

Time to burn some Karma!!

<rant>
Why does it matter what clothes he was wearing?

It matters because by dressing smartly he could reduce his sentance. If he's stubborn^H^H^H^H^Hpid enough to dress the way he wants then he's going to have to face the consequences of the way people interpret that look.

What a world to live in when people judge you by the clothes you wear.

I sympathise with the sentiment... actually scratch that, no I don't. Of course people judge other people by the way they look. Are you trying to tell me that you can't get clues from a person's appearance? If I see a skinhead wearing a football strip with many tattoos of their football club and a few scars then I DO NOT stop them to ask directions.
You use your eyes to guide your judgements about life and people. Complaining when other people do the same is at best childish and at worst ignorant.

Who are you going to ask for directions?
This guy or this guy?

Who would you rather date?
Her or her?

Him, him or him?

Sorry. Had to throw that last one in.

If you have a problem with your appearance then A) dress well and B) stay fit. That's all you need to do.
</rant>

Here's a mirror of the page with pictures and the ~3MB video:

http://personalpages.bellsouth.net/s/a/sanv/kiteca m/

Could you help me install this? Can I email you at mathlete@bellsouth.net? Thanks buddy!

The review site looks to be /.ed so I've uploaded a mirror here:

Mirror

Actually, you need to go back further than that to be 'original'. The Monorail was the first that I can recall that was built on that premise. It had a crappy dual-scan LCD and not much horsepower, but was still a neat looking device that got a lot of service as a POS terminal at a few stores I know of. I still use quite a few of the keyboards, as they showed up at an electronics wholesaler I live near for $5 bucks. They are simply Mitsumi keyboards with a neat dark grey color and light colored keys.

Here's a link to an article remembering the Monorail, as told by LINUX.com

what I'm wondering is, was the server down because the spammer was working for an amateur, or was it down because of the enormous amount of mail flowing thru its outbound pipes, or was it down because it was /.'ed with people trying to buy the product?

...

mozilla's getting pretty good -- I'm especially glad not to see those weekly notices that stri3286@bellsouth.net sent me yet another copy of klez and it was quarantined by the univ. mail servers.

maybe stri3286@bellsouth.net needs to be informed that he's been sending out klez all day long for the past couple of months? I confess I haven't bothered writing him.

Don't forget Felstein@bellsouth.net which was listed as his email address on the Florida Bar Association web site.

Spamming the following addresses:
mark@EMarketersAmerica.org
Felstein@bellsouth.net
mefels@aol.com
would be really naughty. Don't do it. Just in case, I'll spam-proof them:
mark@EMarketersAmerica.NOSPAM.org
Felstein@bellsouth.NOSPAM.net
mefels@aol.NOSPAM.com
Now people know you shouldn't spam them...

mathlete@bellsouth.net

spambots are evil.

If you look closely, most service providers, cable, internet, mobile phone, explicitly state in their contracts that they are not responsible for the quality or availability of the service. For instance, here is a quote from my BellSouth FastAccess DSL Service Agreement, "No minimum level of speed is guaranteed."

dobplans

Build Your Own 4 Inch Dobsonian Telescope

Telescope Making

Dobsonian Evolution

Small Dob Web Site

I built my own Dobsonian!!

You sure about that?

Ok, so before signing a multi-year contract, first make sure whether it is in your best interest to tie yourself into such a long-running agreement or not. Computers are a fast-moving business, and what is a good deal today, may not be a good deal tomorrow. Keeping the option to move makes good business sense.

Then, companies come and go all the time. Especially, in such a fast moving industry such as internet connectivity, you can never know whether your supplier will still be around in five years. Something to consider before doing an advance payment for five years.

Say a year into your 5 year contract the spam crowd decides the whole class b of your upstream ISP is evil and shouldn't be able to email.

Ok, so you have a contract with your ISP. In that contract, they guaranteed you connectivity. If they cannot follow up with their end of the deal for whatever reason, sue them. And if you didn't actually pay for the five years of service in advance, just move over to some better connected supplier. A little spine can go a long way.

And please, have you ever used a hotmail account?

Not really, except when I wanted to say something in an anonymous and untracable way. You have to use it together with an open proxy though, or else your browser's IP will give you away. But hotmail is just one example, which I picked because of its well-knowness. Zillions of other free e-mail services, such as yahoo.com exist though. Take your pick.

First, I don't like the interface, second, it is a spam magnet.

Starting to like the taste of your own medicine?

Antispam blocking has too much collateral damage.

Life isn't fair. But we know that. If you notice that your mail can no longer reach its intended destinations, complain to your ISP. You are their customer. You have a contract with them. They need your money. And, what's best, you speak their language, so they can't just pull an "ethikul biznizman" on you.

For every one spammer you hit you're hitting a hundred people who don't even comprehend the reason they're being blocked.

Ok, in that case, these hundred people will do the logical thing to do in such a situation: complain to their ISP. And if their complaints are not followed up to, they take their business elsewhere.

I don't understand why SO much time has been devoted to kludging the current system instead of redesigning the email system to prevent spam in the first place.

If that was actually done, your e-mail connectivity problems would still not be solved: your backwater ISP wouldn't notice that the world around it had switched e-mail delivery protocols, and your mails would bump into a taller wall than ever before...

I think most of you people who can nonchalantly talk about spam blocking not being a problem have never had the occasion to be in the collateral damage.

I think most people who nonchalantly talk about spam not being a problem never had the occasion to be in the collateral damage. Like receiving over thousand bounced mails per day, because some moron sino-spammer thought it smart to use your e-mail in his forged From field of his missives, so you, not him would get all the bounces and remove messages.

Have never had the antispam community thumb their nose at you.

Have never had spam-friendly ISP's thumb their nose at you? I tell you what: as long as you are not a paying customer of an ISP, they owe you nothing, and some do not hesitate to tell you so. It's an unfortunate fact of life that in our world of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, companies only start listening when you hit them in their pocketbook. Now, starting to understand why causing collateral damage among the paying customers of rogue ISPs makes so much sense?

And, some of those wonderful block lists you support are just as shady as spammers. Take a look at how SPEWS works. They don't even give a real contact point.

That's probably done just to keep the lame whiners away. If you have a real issue with SPEWS, just post to news.admin.net-abuse.mail, and you will either be told why the block is still justified, or they'll eventually take it away.

Or for the more lazy... You can download Adaware from their main site here (but it's temporarily down) or get it from cnet.com here. This will scrub your computer of spyware you have now on it. I would periodically use it as well.

While browsing I would probably use a blocker in addition to your firewall. Maybe something like Spyblocker which will block malicious bugs, cookies, ads, spyware, and worms. This can be downloaded here.

That should keep your computer covered.

Exactly. Just ask their credit-card processing company, they must have some place where they credit the money to.

And even without this, on most spams, you have a sender IP to work with, which leads to an ISP, which theoretically has logs about who used that IP at the time the spam was sent. However, the problem is, many, ISPs don't really care, and consider it more cost efficient to just file mails to abuse into /dev/null .

But I imagine, a court order would really help to encourage them to act, unless of course they didn't keep any logs in the first place. However, spam is often such a minor offense that nobody bothers to intend legal action against the offenders.

You've gotta squint pretty hard....

I was given a dual High-Functioning Autism/Asperger diagnosis by TEACCH in 1994, when I was 46. The dx was confirmed by the University of Pittsburgh when I participated in its autism study. (This is why my nick is the diagnostic code for autism.) FWIW two accounts of my experiences with autism, presented at an AS conference in Sweden in early 1998, are here and here. There is also a huge amount of Asperger info and resources here.

From my perspective, labeling autism as a "fad" or an "excuse" does no one any good. While it might be possible for neurotypical folks to mimic autistic behavior, that is very different from an autistic person being unable to consistently emulate nonautistic behavior and having to put up with the consequences of that 24/7.

There seems a huge amount of misunderstanding regarding autism, much from folks who have a great many expectations of, or assumptions about, autistic folks' behavior. Motives are imputed to our behavior and appearence, as when my often-flat expression and tone of voice are taken as signs that I am upset. (By that interpretation, Data is pissed off nearly all the time.)

IMO what is needed most is a sociological approach to autism, to complement the existing medical/psychological one. This is already underway at a grass-roots level by various folks on the autism spectrum - one early example, a message to parents of autistic children, may be found here.

I was given a dual High-Functioning Autism/Asperger diagnosis by TEACCH in 1994, when I was 46. The dx was confirmed by the University of Pittsburgh when I participated in its autism study. (This is why my nick is the diagnostic code for autism.) FWIW two accounts of my experiences with autism, presented at an AS conference in Sweden in early 1998, are here and here. There is also a huge amount of Asperger info and resources here.

From my perspective, labeling autism as a "fad" or an "excuse" does no one any good. While it might be possible for neurotypical folks to mimic autistic behavior, that is very different from an autistic person being unable to consistently emulate nonautistic behavior and having to put up with the consequences of that 24/7.

There seems a huge amount of misunderstanding regarding autism, much from folks who have a great many expectations of, or assumptions about, autistic folks' behavior. Motives are imputed to our behavior and appearence, as when my often-flat expression and tone of voice are taken as signs that I am upset. (By that interpretation, Data is pissed off nearly all the time.)

IMO what is needed most is a sociological approach to autism, to complement the existing medical/psychological one. This is already underway at a grass-roots level by various folks on the autism spectrum - one early example, a message to parents of autistic children, may be found here.

Mirror here. Please be gentle.

Because most Slackers are fairly self sufficient to start with and aren't afraid to roll up their sleeves and get involved with their OS. Some non-coders even find it easy to contribute, albeit in a small way, by packaging and distributing a few of their favorite apps.

Will Patrick Volkerding become a household name? I don't think so. Will Slackware IPO and make waves on Wall Street? Not likely. But there will always be a solid core of users that can't be convinced that there is a better distro and will continue to keep it so.

Yes, this is not a new thing on ISP.

My ISP, Bellsouth , did the same when Windows2000 was born. So it was funny to see the rp-pppoe.tar.gz on the "drivers CD" and the note on their site about not supporting Windows 2000.

Actualy, it makes the most sense for a serious company: Do not support a new product unless you have people trained in that product.

It should't be so "unusual". Actualy, the article would have been more shocking like this:

"YouNameIt ISP supports Windows XP even before October, 1st."

"We do not need no stinkin trainin', said Joe Sixpack, CEO of YouNameIt ISP. "

"Any bozo with a hand able to point-and-click should do fine with any Windows version. And if anything happens, well, the Client Agreement made the user to surrender any right to protest against us. Heck, in the Alient Agreement even states that we take no responsability even if the user cannot never connect to internet!"

Umm, let's put this into perspective.

It's a well known fact that the former Soviet Union spent, and later earned, the lion's share of its hard currency on the manufacture of arms. While they were building some of the most lethal weapons systems on earth, an ordinary citizen could not buy a decent refrigerator, let alone a reliable automobile. I contend that this led to the collapse of the nation and put them where they are today, having to rely on space tourists and such to help fund their high tech programs.

Comparing a Mig-25 to a SR-71 is ludicrous. The Foxbat could sprint at high speed for a short distance while the Blackbird cruised above Mach 3 at around 90,000 feet. They are not in the same class at all. Anyone remember the Mig-25 pilot that defected by landing his plane on Hokkaido in the mid '70s? All the radios used vacuum tubes. Hardly what you could call sophisticated.

BTW. Way back in my USAF days, stationed here and here from '78 through '81 this was the sort of thing that we kept track of 24/7. There were very few areas where their tecnology was on a par with the west.

-pf

I took a few screen grabs from the video when it was aired on eMpTyV. If you're impatient (like me) and you can't wait to download an entire video file, you can see them here.

While most the discussion has focused on the internet, what BellSouth is doing has greater implications for the future of cable TV. If you noticed, BellSouth is offering 120 channels of digital TV. If they keep building up their infrastructure, they'll have the capabilities to dominate local phone service, internet access, and cable DTV. Given the size of the "Baby" Bells, their is little reason to doubt that they have the resources to win.

Traditional cable companies are eventually going to have to upgrade their infrastructure if they hope to survive. The advent of DTV threatens to choke off cable's available transmission bandwidth. Internet connections constitute a trivial amount of the transmission bandwidth that will be needed in a few years. My guess is that AT&T and the other long-distance carriers are going to provide some of financial backing required to upgrade the local cable network infrastructure.

Ironically, Lucent is providing much of the networking technology that BellSouth is deploying.

Take a peek at what kind of DTV service is available in some parts of Atlanta.

Don't just call your state's Public Service Commission. It's darned important you raise polite hell about BellSouth with the PSC, but don't just do it with them.

You also want to talk to the FCC and possibly the FTC too. Several reasons why...

The FCC can force change nationwide or at the least across BellSouth territory; a PSC can only affect change in one state.

If you contact the FCC as well, they can establish that BellSouth has a pattern of not only anticompetitive behaviour, but also of not serving in the public interest.

The FCC has an increasing number of complaints against BellSouth to begin with and is already investigating them.

The FCC has the right to revoke BellSouth's common carrier status (roughly equivalent to revoking their "license" to run a phone company) if BellSouth refuses to cooperate.

I'm even going to go so far as to say that you should complain to your PSC and the FCC and FTC even if you are NOT trying to get ADSL coverage from BellSouth. BellSouth is a company that indulges in anticompetitive tactics, and deserves to be spanked soundly for many reasons...

I would complain if you fall in ANY of the above categories and are in BellSouth country:

If you have attempted to obtain ADSL service only to be told your OS is not officially supported and told that you cannot connect to the network as a result.

If you have attempted to obtain ADSL service in an area where BellSouth is offering it (see if your area is covered or planned for coverage by hitting BellSouth's webpage) and are told that because you live in an apartment or are told for other reasons that ADSL is not available.

If you have inquired about ADSL from Bellsouth only to be told it is at some other expected time in future and the launch date keeps being pushed back.

If you have been quoted anything at all above ~$50-100/month for ADSL service. (BellSouth has often charged exorbitant prices for ADSL, assuming you can even get it; the planned price in Louisville is something like $400 installation and roughly $300/month metered.)

If you work for a telco and have attempted to sell leased line service for businesses, only to have BellSouth sell you lines at an actual profit to BellSouth and at such a markup as to make it impossible for your company to compete in terms of pricing.

If you have attempted to buy ISDN service through BellSouth and are not in Tennessee. (Costs for ISDN service in most of BellSouth country are literally so expensive that a fractional T1 line is cheaper.)

If you have attempted to buy ISDN service through BellSouth only to be told it is not available in your area because you are too far from the switching station or given any other reason.

If you are a BellSouth customer, in an area where BellSouth is offering both local and LD services (or, for that matter, local and/or LD and/or data services such as bellsouth.net or paging) and there are no local dialing providers at all. (It is illegal under the Telecommunications Act for BellSouth to offer LD or data services in any local market it services where competition does not exist for local dialup. THE FCC NEEDS TO BE TOLD IF THIS IS HAPPENING WHERE YOU LIVE.)

If you are in BellSouth territory, BellSouth offers LD and/or data services (such as bellsouth.net or paging) and there are no competitors that are as cheap or cheaper than BellSouth. (Again, they CANNOT sell LD or data services till local phone service competition exists.)

If you have been forced to buy T1 service from BellSouth or been forced to buy package deals from BellSouth for services such as caller ID or call forwarding. (There have been reports that folks who have tried to buy ADSL from BellSouth have been told ADSL cannot be installed nor can ISDN, and they have been pressured to buy a T1 line instead. Bellsouth makes its Big Money on T1 lines...BellSouth also has the habit of pricing optional services such as caller ID and call waiting so high that the mere combination of a regular phone line, CID, and call waiting is literally MORE EXPENSIVE than a $35/month package deal that comes with more services that they want to sell.)

BellSouth needs spanking on basic principle. Slashdot the hell out of the PSCs, the FCC, and the FTC and let them know just what you think of BellSouth's horrid service...best case, BellSouth is forced to clean up its act. Worst case, BellSouth loses its "phone company" license and someone more competent moves in like Unidial...hell, even US Worst would be better (at least you can actually GET AND AFFORD ADSL and/or ISDN).